


Tale as Old as Time

by thecumberbinch



Series: I Let You Go [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Classical Music, Episode: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords, Episode: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, F/M, M/M, Poetic, romantic mush, sad shit, thoughts before death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 09:50:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13164438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecumberbinch/pseuds/thecumberbinch
Summary: Missy's thoughts on the mondasian ship after the Master shoots her. Sad and sappy. If you really want to cry, listen to Rachmaninoff's 2nd symphony, movement three adagio while reading.





	Tale as Old as Time

_Without hope. Without witness. Without reward._

They made a promise, once: a promise sealed in blood and almost as old as time. How did that stupid little fairytale go again? _Tale as old as time_ , they say; all that mushy romance rubbish.

            Except their love wasn’t out of a fairytale. It wasn’t a sweet, innocent kind of love. It was a violent kind of love, the kind that burned whole solar systems and threatened to tear down the stars; the kind that killed, leaving whole armies of ghosts in their wake.

 

Morally righteous people find the idea appalling. It’s an abomination in their eyes, not even close to the idea of love.

Death is not love to them: it’s sin.

But if anything, doesn’t death make it more beautiful? After all, love that lasts longer than whole civilizations can never be pure: it’s contaminated with the filthy hands of time itself.

How many times have they died while their lover pulls the trigger? They’ve double-crossed and betrayed each other more than they can count, but the one thing that never changes is the unwavering love; the promise made millennia in the past.

Just as much as they have changed, they have stayed the same.

Real love can never be pure: real love is violent, real love is a thunderstorm: real love _burns_. It’s the inferno in their hearts, beating in tandem as they fight, as they make love, slowing as they die while the other laughs or cries at the realization of what they’ve done.

They hate each other enough to kill, but they love each other enough to turn the universe to ashes.

The pair of them is a walking contradiction; hate and love cannot exist at the same time, for the same two people, from the same two people. It doesn’t matter, though; they’re Time Lords, they were born to mess with time and create paradoxes: everything’s all wibbly wobbly timey-wimey; it’s not supposed to make sense.

It’s chaos, and chaos is what makes it beautiful, in the end.

They scream at each other just as much as they smile at each other; that’s the way love is; it’s a messy, violent, burning, living thing.

And oh, it’s more dangerous than any weapon in the universe.

Love is a song, and it seems that their final notes are ringing in the air. The movements close, all culminating into an emotional finale filled with all the things that happened before, and then it fades to black.

But is that really it for them? Can the strongest love in the universe really die, just like that? Become just another blip in time and space?

 

_Death is for other people._

 

And then she realizes that maybe this _is_ the last time. Their song is ending, and there’s nothing to be done. And she remembers him, the last words she heard fall from his lips:

           

            _“Stand with me.”_

And she had walked away. He will never know that this whole time she _stood with him,_ through thick and thin, thousands of years of love and pain.

 

When either of them had met their death, she would always have the last laugh. When she feels her hearts slowing, she remembers the last time she died, laughing in the Doctor’s arms on that piece of shit ship.

            She opens her mouth expecting her usual staccato laugh.

Instead, she begins to cry.

The tears rolling down her cheeks in rivers turn to waterfalls and sobs shake her chest until she can barely breathe because she knows now that death comes for everyone in the end, even Time Lords.

            Is it possible that she could ever feel so much regret at once?

Love. It’s a destroyer of worlds, a fixed point in time, the biggest fire anyone could ever set ablaze, and none bigger than theirs.

She considers the idea of changing the past; what if she had understood sooner?

But would it have really made a difference, in the end?

 _No_ , she thinks, _because we were always a walking disaster. This was bound to happen at one point or another._

Oh Missy: Missy, Missy, Missy. How could you have made such a grave mistake? Hush now, time has taken its toll on the both of you.

Yards away, the Doctor himself had begun to die. He thinks of Missy and wonders what he could’ve done.

 

_Time enough now, your song is ending._

 

Listen to the music, and remember all the things you’ve done. Remember that your love is just as strong as your hate, but the love will always slip through the cracks.

They are both tired of fighting: with each other and with themselves. They can’t decide which is worse.

Time itself is fatigued, the old thing: never ending, never beginning.

Their love has marked the universe with fixed points in time; scars are the destruction of planets and the explosions of stars, beauty marks the bits and pieces they’ve left for the other to find.

 

 

Time itself has been forever changed from their beautiful, disparaging love. Everything fades to black, and the last thing they look for are the stars.

 

_Stars. I hoped there’d be stars._

 

            Tale as old as time, indeed.


End file.
